This is an update of an article I first posted in 10 November 2018. It follows on a series of articles about historical films of wind turbines.
In 1980 the Department of Energy published a short film titled Wind: An Energy Alternative. The 12-minute film was produced by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) probably in 1979.
The film has been digitized by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and is made available in collaboration with the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava04039vnb1
At the time I was working for Vaughn Nelson at West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas. Nelson and WTSU were doing a lot of work with the USDA at the Bushland agricultural research station on Darrieus wind turbines and wind-assisted pumping for irrigation on the Great Plains.
One of the home-built wind turbines at the end of the video was near Canyon and I have a couple of scanned images of the slides I took of that device. I remember using images of it in my slide programs I gave in the early 1980s.
The film opens with Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, setting the tone. It’s a triumphal piece and what better way to celebrate the promise of wind energy. (I may have seen Copeland himself perform the piece when I was living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.)
The first wind turbine shown is Terry Mehrkam’s machine at Dorney Amusement Park in eastern Pennsylvania. Mehrkam was killed near San Diego on one of his own machines during the California wind rush in 1981.
The film moves on to American water-pumping windmills and then to pre-REA windchargers, featuring Jacobs Wind-Electric. It then introduces installation of the Smith-Putnam turbine in the early 1940s with some scenes of the machine in operation.
Marcellus Jacobs is highlighted in an off-screen interview. Subsequently, the film moves on to Rockwell’s Rocky Flats test center with a shot of a Northwind HR3 and then an Enertech 1800.
There’s a clip of a Carter 25 kW, two-blade, 10-meter diameter downwind turbine and a closeup of the HR3.
The film shifts to promotion of DOE & NASA’s large machine program with scenes of GE’s Mod-1 (yes, that GE) above Boone, North Carolina in 1979. It was already derelict in 1981 and shortly thereafter removed. There was a lot of “We told you so” at the time. GE’s Mod-1 logged 0 (zero) operating hours. It never got past its shakedown period. I have no record of it logging any generation, though it must have produced something.
The Mod-0A turbines in the film were all also removed in 1982.
The WTG turbine developed by Alan Spalding at Cuttyhunk also had a checkered history. (See WTG Energy Systems’ MP-200 (1975-1982)) It was clunky, but it did work. Though, it too was eventually removed as was its sister turbine on the Oregon coast.
There’s a clip of the Schachle wind turbine at Moses Lake, Washington on its circular track, a form of yawing not seen since the Soviet’s VIME-30 at Balaklava in the 1930s.
There’s an off-camera interview with Ted Finch and his successful effort to install a Jacobs in the late 1970s on a tenement in the Bronx borough of New York City.
There’s also rare footage in the film of stacked Darrieus or eggbeater wind turbines above the Clearwater Times in St. Petersburg, Florida. At one time I remembered the name of the architect promoting the concept, but that was long ago in a land far away.
Stewart Russell’s sharp eye caught that the film had been posted to the Internet Archive and saw that I was mentioned in the credits along with a list of then illustrious names in wind energy. I must have somehow helped the film crew for them to list me alongside Frank Eldridge, Ted Finch, and Carl Wilcox. Eldridge of Mitre Corp had published one of the seminal works in English reviewing wind energy’s state of the art in the late 1970s. Wilcox was one of the last surviving members of the crew that worked on the Smith-Putnam project. You can find images from Wilcox’s archive at Smith-Putnam Industrial Photos.
Russell commented on the film and that comment got picked up by Brent Summerville at Appalachian State University and his comment made its way to FaceBook where it came across my feed. Summerville’s post on FB includes a stunning professional DOE photo of the Mod-1 looking down on the nacelle as it was being assembled. That photo is a collector’s item.
The video can also be found on YouTube.
